EU urged to develop green laws for public authorities

The European Commission and Member States are being urged to make green public procurement mandatory for public authorities in the region.

The European Committee of the Regions (CoR) is calling for binding economic regulations on sustainable sourcing and urging them to incentivise secondary raw materials, by allowing preferential tax rates to be applied to them by member states.

It suggests the ‘polluter pays’ principle – which is enacted to make the party producing pollution responsible for paying for the damage done to the natural environment – to be “thoroughly applied and implemented swiftly”.

According to the CoR, cities and regions want ambitious and legally binding measures to boost a circular economy model that preserves the value of products and resources, is sustainable, low carbon, technologically advanced and resource efficient.

Babette Winter, State Secretary for Europe and Culture of Thuringia and rapporteur of the CoR said: “We cannot build a long term circular economy without an ambitious and clear action plan and certainly not without political will and we need to take citizens with us on this journey.

“We must start by ending counterproductive subsidies and regulatory measures that go against circular-economy objectives such as funding production sites or products that do not meet eco-design requirements.”